Hello, folks! After yet another long pause, I'm back at SFC:OP w/ OPPlus 4.11 on my Linux machine. WINE has been ultra stable this time--no crashes at all. I'm slowly gobbling up Klingon territory as the Hydrans in a conquest campaign. I modified the .gs files to prevent the "creeping lag" syndrome (thanks Corbo) and all appears to be well. However, I've noticed a possible bug, but I cannot find any mention of it after searching the forums, so I wanted to ask if any fix was known.

When I first started, I would buy fighters at the shipyard, but they would disappear when I entered a battle. I found a thread on this, and it said that if you set your working directory to the location of "StarFleetOP.exe", then this would not happen. I configured this in WINE, and poof! My fighters re-appeared. HOWEVER...

I have a new / separate problem. When I open the shuttle bay listing, all my fighters, no matter what type / class, are displayed as "Patrol Fighters"--both the pop-up tip and the unit icon. I typically carry 2 heavy squadrons of Hornet-III for long-range harassment and 1-2 assault squadrons of Wasp-III for self-protection. With this bug, however, I cannot tell them apart, so I'm constantly launching the wrong type for the wrong role.

1) Is this at all related to the "disappearing fighters" problem?

2) Where is the text for this stored--in ftrlist.txt? Could this be a problem of mis-labeling (or just omission) in a file somewhere?

3) Since both the icon AND the text are wrong, would this data be stored in the .exe or some other file not easily readable?

If I can get one or the other fixed, that would solve the problem. I just want to know what I'm launching!

Thanks for your help, everyone!

(Edit on 5/11/18: Separate question about v2564 community patch removed and placed into separate thread.)

The icon and name and quicktip for fighters are entirely based on the unit's BPV. Taldren never enabled a more sophisticated ID scheme. Even PFs use this same system. You can make a "heavy" fighter with tons of weaponry and armor, but if its BPV is less than 10(?), it'll always show "Patrol" on the UI. The targeting reticle should however truly identify the fighter type (Hornet.II) at range 5 or more. At close range it may display the generic term, Fighter, since those units never have designations like "Enterprise" or "Flamma Accipter".

Tar - Wow, thanks for the quick service! So, based on your comment, is there a BPV amount that will "re-assign" each fighter group to their proper type? Will, say, a BPV of 12 cause them to be identified as "Heavy", whereas a BPV of, say, 11 set them as "Interceptors"? I can edit the ftrlist.txt if needed to get this to work, I just don't have any info on the required BPV entries.

Also, should I split out my second question? I almost did that before I posted.

I forget the exact values. A text editor for ftrlist.txt in ../Assets/specs (and the ftrlist.txt in ../MetaAssets if you're doing a campaign) should quickly find the BPV breakpoints for Patrol, Interceptor, Assault(Heavy?).

I think the OPPlus mod may have scaled the values to bring the BPVs closer into line with SFB standards, as virtually none of the fighters are rated any higher than about 8. The Hornet-III was rated a 7, which potentially might have placed it into a non-Patrol category, based on your info. However, it's one of the most powerful fighters in the game, so I would have thought that it would rate higher than 7.

According to one of the old reference books about the game, the "vanilla" BPVs were scaled by era, so even the early-era Assault fighters should cost no more than 5-6, while the late-era fighters of all types should be between 11-15. If that reference is accurate, then all the fighters in the early era could show up as Patrol, but all late-era fighters could appear as Assault. :D

I understand making short-cuts in coding to get around tenacious problems, but this is a bummer. If it really is coded that way, I can adjust the BPVs in the file, but it's gonna skew the missions and drafting somewhat, so I'll have to account for that. :-\

Tar, thanks for the help. Any further suggestions? I'm not against editing the BPVs, but do you know of a source where I can check the BPV ranges for what you indicated?

Just add a bunch of Hydran fighters called test7, test8, test9, etc. Set the BPV to 7, 8, 9, etc. Do a skirmish with a H-CAVIt's ten minutes of testing to find the breakpoints.

As far as BPV skewing campaign battle generation...I believe the fighters' BPV is never included. If you are matched with a 180 BPV H-Overlord, its partial squadron of Hornet.III with all those Ph-G and HellF is not relevant. The campaign thinks your F-BCG is a fair match (180 vs 180). It's been a while, so I might be mistaken. Same goes for a K-D5D with over a hundred fast misiles. The battle generator treats it identically to a D5D with slow missiles.

I figured the testing wouldn't take much time. I just thought that this might be documented somewhere handy. No prob, I'll fire up the testing when I get a few minutes.

Wow, really?! Fighter and missile types aren't figured in? I can see why writing code to account for this during drafting may be tricky, but man, that could really give Hydrans in particular a huge edge (and Mirak, in the case of missiles)! If that's the case, then does fighter BPV have any impact on the game, other than determining what the UI shows in the shuttle bay listing?

Please understand, I'm not contradicting you, by any means, I'm just rather surprised, actually. BPV is such an important value, at least in SFB. It seems strange to relegate that crucial value to UI setup.

Buying replacement Hornet.IIIs will cost more prestige than YellowJackets in spacedock The dynaverse server can make them very expensive for players. A plasma torpedo, however, always costs the same...so early on Plasma chuckers have an advantage, but as faster missiles, warcruisers, and hideous things called Caveat.III are deployed, the tide turns.

To test out the effect this has on a large carrier, I purchased fighters for each of the 4 squadrons on a Hydran Monarch-V BBVx (it was handy in the shipyard).

Cost per single Fighter Purchased (Advanced Era):

Killer Bee-III = 32Yellow Jacket-III = 43Hornet-III = 50Wasp-III = 61

In other words, to outfit a Monarch-V BBVx (which has 5 fighters per squadron) with 2 squadrons of Hornet-III and 2 squadrons of Wasp-III, the Prestige cost is 910. :D Ouch!

Now, there's a couple ways to take this.

1) Tar pointed out that ships which don't use fighters (such as some plasma ships) start out at an advantage, but as fighters get better, fighter-poor ships lose some of their economic advantage. These numbers could be used as a way to balance any late-game advantage provided to fighter-heavy races.

2) If fighters are too cheap, players can treat them as a type of Phaser-based MIRV. These increased costs could be used as a way to moderate casual "wastage". Replacement costs will encourage better fighter management and more thought regarding their deployment and recall.

I know these last two points sound like justification, and to a certain degree, they are. However, IMHO, fighters always seemed too inexpensive and disposable. In the real world, especially modern times, crews wouldn't be sacrificed so casually--they're too valuable of a resource and too expensive to constantly replace. So I'm interested to see how this affects my own playing style and tactical decisions.

Well since the numbers are figured out maybe someone or maybe sometime down the line of exploration; those numbers will be run into and can be manipulated to show the icons and also keep the purchasing balance by increasing the low brackets. You never know. But for now you have to decide whatís more important, icons or balancing. I know. Itís hard lolWe want the game just right.

If those numbers can be located and altered to reflect a more sensible approach that keeps the price/balance then it would be great but itís not a priority at the moment. Itís a lot of work looking through the Hex just for this icon issue. Fighters donít even behave as we want them to, they donít fire strategically, waste ordinance, disobey orders and needlessly get themselves killed and wasted. Icon is the least of our problems. But if we run into those numbers by accident why not change them. But itís not a task Iím willing to spend hours on.

My planet project takes up most my time. Tim setup doesnít have this option atm and Carlosí project imho is more worth it than this. Personnel and resources are limited in our small group.

But donít let this diminish or discourage you from contributing to the SFC project. Those numbers you have retrieved will help track down the bug. Maybe not in the immediate but eventually when one of us pokes around and sees that particular pattern, then it can be addressed. I hope you understand where I am coming from.

This is a good introductory task for someone new to hexediting and disassembly. Search for integers 9, 12, 14 or 10, 13, 15 in succession. The data will likely be found in StarfleetOP.exe. It might have the info stored as 14, 12, 9. There won't be many occurrences...it's too specific to be found a dozen times. They won't be stored as floating-point numbers. Probably ordinary integers in hexadecimal as the bytes 09, 0C, 0E or 0A, 0D, 0F (or perhaps 4-byte length as 09000000, 0C000000, 0E000000).

Glad to be of service to everyone. Given how much I've learned about the game from reading everyone's posts, it's probably about time I gave back to the group.

Captain - Based on other posts, I'm certain there are items on the repair list much higher than this. This problem was just a minor annoyance for which I thought someone may have already found a fix. Since I'm running SFCOP under WINE, I wondered if this might be another artifact from that.

Tar - Thanks for your help and additional info. I adjusted all the BPVs in the ftrlist.txt so that I can continue my campaign and see how the BPV changes impact the situation.

d4v1ks - No problem, happy to help out. I'll keep an eye on that forum thread you included, as that's some fascinating background on the game's coding.

Itís was going to be revisited. I was going to do something with those icons bc in my future mod I want to be able to distinguish btwn Peregrine fighters, Danube runabouts, etc...We do have a lot on the list. I wish we had more time and resources. But Iím glad youíll stick around. Lots to read. Lots to learn and catch up on. ;-)

Well, thanks for the inadvertent compliment, Tar, but I'm not Ardak. ;) My understanding is that Ardak Kumerian is a character created by an SFB player who wrote fan fiction. This commander was sort of the prototypical Klingon strategist who made a name for himself along the Federation border and rose in the ranks over time. Sort of the Klingon version of Horatio Hornblower.

As for the PF data, I might be able to look at this in the next few days, but my work schedule is picking back up, including some overtime projects that are coming due. If possible, I'll try to fit in some additional testing time here and there.

The standard PF data is confined to the shiplist.txt file, just like the main-line ships, yes? There isn't another data file floating around with additional stats, maybe one that I missed somewhere? You guys know more about the directory structure than I do at this point.

I haven't had much time to follow-up on this (work and real life keep intervening), but I have determined a few things:

1) Using the Gorn as a reference, the BPV values in the original shiplist.txt and the OPPlus 4.11 shiplist.txt appear to be the same, in particular for the 5 main types of PFs (INT, PFS, PF, PF+, and PFL). I've checked through my directories and compared several versions of each, just to be sure they were all the same (I made backups at several points before installing various mods). This appears to be the case. This result would suggest that the roll-over text for the UI is not linked to the BPV, at least not in the same way that fighter shuttles are linked.

2) Assuming that the numbers for the OPP4.11 shiplist.txt were the starting point, I wonder if changing the BPVs in a way similar to the fighter shuttles would be a valid fix anyway. To get the UI text correct, I had to roughly double the BPV of the fighter shuttles (per squadron of 4, Hydran Killer Bee III went from 20 to 36, while Hornet III went from 28 to 56). Assuming that we had to apply the same process by scaling the BPVs upward, a squadron of Gorn INT (26 each) might increase from 78 to 156 while PFL squadrons (53 each) might increase from 159 to 318. That would make the cost of a PFL disproportionate to its actual combat effectiveness. If, on the other hand, we scale the BPVs DOWNWARD, then PFs almost become more cost effective than fighter shuttles, which is also disproportionate to their respective combat effectiveness.

Now, I don't know as much about the innards of the code as some of you do, so maybe I'm missing a key item here. However, it seems to me that using altered BPV numbers to "fix" the UI for Fast Patrol ships is less practical (and less cost effective) than for fighter shuttles. Due to time constraints, I haven't tested any altered BPV numbers in-game yet, so I would still have to try this to get actual BPV data (assuming it works that way).

Sorry I'm slow on this, but I hope the analysis so far helps to clarify a few things. Let me know if I'm way off track here.

Thanks for checking this out. I bet Taldren used a multiplier for the PF icon and hover-text.

An excellent PF is very roughly equivalent to two top-tier fighters. But a basic PF is just as crummy as 4 primitive fighters in Taldren's Ph-3 insane universe (firing at range 8+ consistently).

Since each "bay" on a carrier typically holds 4 fighters or exactly one PF, a multiple of four may be present.

Let's say a PF has a BPV of 41. It'll use the "interceptor" icon because it is greater than 4x10. Any PF with a BPV less than 40 would use the wimpy "patrol" icon. I don't know if the actual multiplier is x2 or x3 or something weird like x1.67. I highly doubt the calculation is logarithmic or exponential.

Hmmm...a "built-in" multiplier for PFs seems plausible, although that obviously complicates things just a bit. It is a place to start, though.

Due to some technical issues, I just re-installed SFC:OP using the 2564 HD community patch, plus the Fests and OPPlus 4.11 packages. Since I've never run this combination under Linux / WINE (or ever, for that matter), I'll need to do some basic stability tests before I can start testing BPV numbers for the PFs. My current version of WINE is pretty stable, but I had a box pop up on the 2564 patch install, saying that WINE required Gecko for the embedded HTML. :huh: Haven't ever seen that message before with WINE. I installed the Gecko package for my flavor of Linux, so we'll see what happens.

I'll let everyone know when I have something to report. If you see a Hydran Lord Bishop cruise by, that's probably me.

I put my hard drive from my Win7 laptop into an old Vista laptop. Amazingly the machine works.

So I looked at the icon functions yesterday with IDA. I can see a comparison to 8, which is either the array size of shuttle/fighter icon varieties or the maximum number of icons shown in the shuttle bay panel.

Another function is called to assign a suicide shuttle a value of 1, a wild weasel a 2, a Hornet.ll a 5, a PF an 8, etc. This arbitrary integer is used to load the icon bitmap and write the hover-text quicktip.

I suspect that Taldren didn't treat PF BPV differently from fighter BPV. A PF with a value of 15 or more will always use the "Heavy" icon and text. There are no defined icons for PFs in sprites. Only a very cheap PF will use a Patrol icon, for example, I believe.

Well, a Hornet.II in the original ftrlist.txt is definitely 5 BPV. However, the cheapest PF from any race is 19. Now, there is a column in the shiplist.txt called "Balance" and each PF for every PF-using race has a value in this column of "-5". If you shave off 5 from 19, that's still 14. The economy.gf file could have an impact on this, but if it hasn't been edited, then it shouldn't have an impact on what's seen on the display.

Here's where the confusion starts for me. If the cheapest PF in the game will cost no less than 14 (assuming there aren't any other hidden factors), then it appears that the icon / text in the shuttle bay will never work correctly, even right out of the box with no mods. At the same time, if the PFs require the same BPV value ranges as fighters to display properly, then that would seem to insert a significant and obvious game imbalance in favor of PF-using races. :huh: I'll try to investigate further on my end.

BTW, I was re-reading your post on the H/S forums regarding the shuttle panel, and I was curious about something. The three fighter icons with the I / II / III designations--where do those appear? I wondered if they were a hold-over from the Hydran Stinger fighter designations. I've never seen them in the game anywhere.

If the balance of a 25-BPV unit is 5 or -5, the game will treat it as a 25, never as a 30 or a 20. The "balance" data is to show programmers which ships are weaker or stronger than the sum of their parts. It's not "economic BPV" from SFB. You can override the balance data by directly editing the shiplist.txt. The entire column can be set to zero or 999, and it won't affect the game.

Fighter icons with I, II, and III were an idea that was never implemented. The old Stinger fighters were in shiplist.txt because there wasn't a ftrlist.txt. I think a H-ST6 represented six fighters.

Hmm would it make sense to use any icon for a PF besides the "heavy" one? Ideally the PFs should have four icons that aren't shared with fighters.

Ahhh...didn't know that about Balance. I was definitely thinking SFB and making the assumption that it would affect BPV.

That's interesting--the I / II / III icons were never implemented but are still in there. I had forgotten about the location of the Stinger data, so I guess these wouldn't be connected after all.

Quote

Ideally the PFs should have four icons that aren't shared with fighters.

See, that's what puzzles me. I agree that you could think of all PFs as some sort of "super heavy" fighter. However, since there are multiple types of PF and since some ships could mix-and-match types, it only makes sense to have separate icons for each PF type. Otherwise, just like the fighters, you're launching craft blind without knowing what you are doing.

I don't know if this is remotely possible, but if the I / II / III icons are unimplemented, could they be "borrowed" to represent the PFs in some way? It would sure help in keeping track of what's on-board, and people wouldn't have to use arbitrary BPVs to get separate icons.

Yes, the icons can likely be reassigned. This requires a week of labor, maybe more, to expand the array, adjust the strings.txt, update the sprites, etc. The question is whether 40 hours of study is a good investment for the potential result. Usually carriers in SFC have uniform squadrons of Hornets or Wasps. SFB demanded Fusion Beam fighters to escort the Hellbore fighters, but this restriction doesn't apply in SFC. I understand how the icon ambiguity in the shuttle bay is annoying. If we could tweak one function to accomplish this in an hour, it would be reasonable. But it isn't a simple task -- for me. I'll take a look at two functions this week. I'm very rusty with assembly code.

After making sure my re-install was stable, I went back and systematically tested some BPV ranges for the PFs. For testing, I used the Gorn PFs in Skirmish mode (Aside: from what I could tell, Skirmish mode uses the shiplist from the Specs folder, while the Campaign mode uses the shiplist in the MetaAssets folder--didn't know that). PFs don't appear to use quite the same, clean BPV pattern as the fighters:

I stopped after 39, as I have an early day tomorrow and it's already the small hours of the morning here. I might have time to continue testing later this week, but for now, we at least have some idea of how the BPVs correlate with the icons / text.

Thanks for the experimental data. Looks like a broken relationship by sloppy programming. Can't imagine this is working as intended.

The campaign uses the shiplist.txt in the MetaAssets folder by default. Skirmish Mode uses the shiplist.txt in Assets\specs.

Taldren specifically did this to allow players to simultaneously have different specification environments. One for mPlayer Arcade (later Gamespy and Gameranger and Evolve) and a second for Dynaverse campaigns. You could play on a TNG Dynaverse server for a while and then jump into the arcade version for a free-for-all without having to overwrite your shiplist and ftrlist.

If you want to automatically use your skirmish specs for your singleplayer Dyna campaign, change the assets.gf in MetaAssets\ServerProfiles\Singleplayer.

I just ran across something confusing about the v2564 HD patch, so I need to ask a question.

I am 34 missions into an ISC campaign using the v2564 HD patch + OPPlus 4.11 (for the HD patch). I modified my MetaAssets folder to use the updated fighter and PF BPV data (weird though it may be). I also modified several of the .gf files so that I could minimize how fast the size of the database file grows (thereby slowing the "creeping turn lag" problem). However, the game doesn't seem to be using my data.

Upon investigation, I noticed that there are 3 locations where .gf files are located:

Tar, you indicated that the shiplist and ftrlist from MetaAssets are used for campaigns. However, the .gf files from the MetaAssets folders don't seem to be the ones that are being used for my single player campaign. Further, in the main SFCOP directory, there is a "SinglePlayerSettings.gf" file that sets the Profile path to Assets / Settings / Local.

So based on your last comment, if "Dedicated" is read for Skirmish Mode and "MetaAssets" is read for Campaign Mode, then what does "Local" control? What am I missing here, folks?

Thanks for any help. If this means what I think it means, I'll be abandoning yet another campaign because of incorrect settings.

Version 2.564 may have a reorganized asset directory. I'll take a look at it today. There should be exactly one file named assets.gf, and that controls the paths to your active shiplist.txt and ftrlist.txt for singleplayer campaign mode.

Assets\Settings\... ?

This must be a modification by Carlos for the last patch. I'm sure there's a good reason for it. The .exe needs spec paths in assets.gf to load the ship and fighter data files. If there are two or more assets.gf, that would be a problem.

Surprise, surprise.In 2564 both the client and server were merged into a single folder, and their settings into a fresh location at ".Assets\Settings\".The folder ".\MetaAssets\" exists only as part of the OP+411 package to keep compatibility with old missions that could have used MagnumMan shiplist's source code.

The picture here (https://hotandspicyforums.com/starfleet-command-orion-pirates-2500-2564-patch-t25292.html#p254950), illustrates well how a clean 2564 installation should look like.

I appreciate the explanation, gentlemen, but I'm not sure that answers my question.

Tar - Got it. That may explain why "SinglePlayerSettings.gf" exists in the base directory for SFCOP. I'll take a look at the assets.gf file to see if that enlightens things a bit.

d4v1ks - Yeah, surprise indeed. I saw that image when I was installing, but I wasn't sure if it was exactly the same for OP. Part of those examples were based on CE and the notes indicate they are similar, but I didn't assume that meant "identical".

Based on your two emails, I still have three questions:

1) Which folder actually contains the data for single player campaigns?2) Must all the relevant files from that folder match MetaAssets to prevent OPP411 from getting out-of-sync with the rest of the game?3) Is my current campaign toast, or can I just copy the relevant files from MetaAssets into whichever directory controls single player campaigns, then go on from there?

If you change the shiplist and ftrlist during a campaign, it shouldn't crash if your ship and fighters exist in the new specs. Most missions load opposing and allied ships indirectly, rarely by name such as G-CCH. It'll request a Heavy Cruiser or Frigate or Dreadnought, etc.

Your current campaign cannot continue if you change the mission roster. Let's say you don't want to do scout missions. Your saved campaign data file will contain references to the scout missions and if your new roster lacks them, your game could fail to load or crash.

You shouldn't encounter any serious problems if you edit the economy.gf or similar files. They are meant to be edited mid-campaign, afaik.

Changing the hex map will likely crash the game if you're in hex ( 20, 15 ) but those coordinates don't exist in an edited galactic map.

Honestly, the singleplayer campaign never interested me beyond my first one as a Lyran. So my expertise in .gf modifications is lacking.

I hope you can salvage your 30+ scenario investment in your current game save.

I think you'll be able to resume your campaign. I'd update the path to the assets that you want to use, rather than copy and overwrite several .gfs. Whichever way helps you keep organized is recommended.

PFs can perhaps be made affordable, in terms of prestige, in the economy.gf file.